Checking the facts

Two examples from other blogs

Mark Liberman, in two posts at Language Log, tackles the claim

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the paper, “Cluttered Writing: Adjectives and Adverbs in academia,” finds that social science papers contain the highest density, followed by humanities and history. Natural science and mathematics contain the lowest frequency, followed by medicine and business and economics.

The difference between the social and the natural sciences is about 15 percent. “Is there a reason that a social scientist cannot write as clearly as a natural scientist?” the paper asks.

He shows that the paper doesn’t provide reliable evidence for the claims, and, in the second post, that neither the claim that social scientists use more modifiers, nor the claim that clear writing uses fewer modifiers is supported by data.

Frances Woolley, at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, uses life tables to examine the question of grandparents’ funerals as a student excuse. She finds

It turns out, given the age and gender distribution assumed above, and Canadian mortality rates, the odds of all 200 grandparents surviving the term is just 16 percent. In large undergraduate classes, some grandparents will pass away almost every semester.

and

I think some undergraduate students don’t realize just how public and well documented deaths are. It’s far easier to verify whether or not a grandmother died than it is to know whether or not a student was genuinely too sick to complete an assignment.